• Stereotype threat:
How your children’s beliefs about other people can hinder his performance in school and elsewhere

I’ll
keep adding more articles over time. Meanwhile, here’s an overview of
some of the more practical discoveries about social cognition in
children.

What is social cognition?

I’ve never really liked the term “social cognition.” It sounds too
much like “groupthink,” which is about conformity and a failure to
reason critically.

But social cognition is really just a label for research about the cognitive processes that give rise to social phenomena.

Around
the world, there are laboratories and research groups devoted to the
emotional, developmental, psychological, cross-cultural neurological,
and evolutionary underpinnings of social thinking and behavior.

And
there are people who study social phenomena through field work.
Anthropologists like Marc Flinn, who studies the effects of family
relationships on child development, health, and the stress response. Or
Craig Stanford, who seeks to understand the origins of human sociality
by studying meat-eating and meat-sharing in chimpanzees.

The developmental origins of social intelligence: Baby social skills?

Like most primates, humans are very social. And we seem to be especially well-equipped for coping with social situations.

Immediately
after birth, newborns show a preference for looking at face-like
stimuli. They recognize their mothers’ voices (which they’ve heard from
the womb) and they learn very quickly to identify their mothers’ faces.

In
fact, despite their sensory shortcomings (which include blurry vision
and relatively poor hearing), newborns express all sorts of social
preferences. They prefer to listen to
“infant directed speech,”
that emotionally exaggerated, sing-song style of speech that adults
often adopt when addressing babies. And they prefer people who make
direct eye contact with them. For more information, see this article on
social cognition in newborns.

So even before we’ve had a chance to enculturate our children, they are already showing a special interest in the social world.

Indeed,
some aspects of social cognition may be “wired in.” Newborns are more
likely to cry when they hear other newborns (but not necessarily older
babies) crying.

Perhaps this reflects the work of mirror neurons,
those nerve cells that fire both when we perform an action and when we
perceive that same action being performed by another person.

Empathy: The bedrock of social cognition and moral reasoning

Mirror neurons might explain why at least one rudimentary aspect of
empathy—the ability to share the pain of another person—seems to show up
in brain scans using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Jean
Decety and his colleagues have presented kids with photographs of
people in pain. When the kids examined these pictures, they experienced
brain activity in regions associated with first-hand experiences of
pain. For details, see this article on
empathy and the brain.

So what can parents do to promote good social skills--and smart social reasoning--in children?

What to do

Research suggests we should start early by treating young
children--even young babies--as individuals with thoughts, goals,
feelings, and intentions. This approach is called
mind-minded parenting,
and studies have linked it with more
secure attachment relationships
and the development of strong empathic and perspective-taking skills.

There are pitfalls to avoid, too, like the
overuse of praise
and the practice of bribing kids with tangible rewards.

Babies as
young as 12 months may try to comfort other people in distress
(Eisenberg and Fabes 1998), and experiments have established that
14-month old toddlers will spontaneously offer help to strangers
(Warneken and Tomasello 2007).

But we can mess this up. When we
promise kids rewards for being helpful, we actually undermine their
motivation for helping. For details, see this article on
raising helpful kids.